Archive for October 31st, 2014

I haven’t blogged much here about the peace ministry of my brother, Dan. I don’t often vary from journalism and media topics here (when I wrote about Dan’s memoir, Peace Warrior, I examined the media themes he addressed in the book).

I’m not going to stretch to connect this post to the media, except to observe that in my religion-writing days (1998-2000 for the Des Moines Register), I spent an ungodly amount of my time covering conflict and outright hatred among and within religious communities.

So I’m proud of Dan and his work in peacemaking and conflict resolution, especially in interfaith reconciliation, and I thought I’d share this slice of it here. This is his August address to the North American Interfaith Network‘s Connect Conference that he helped organize and host in Detroit this year:

If you’re interested in the Common Word organization that Dan mentioned, he had the URL wrong. Check the link above, rather than the .0rg link he mentioned.

Leading the way was Baquet’s guest post questioning whether I and others were creating a “new priesthood” with “new rules for entry,” regarding who is a journalist.

It was an overstatement at best and an inaccurate metaphor. But it drew a lot of interest: more than 6,700 views in the month, including nearly 4,900 the first day, when I set a single-day record for views on the blog.

Baquet’s guest post and my curations of tweets by Shirky and Lexi Mainland of the Times totaled more than 10,000 views. Perhaps I need to just post other people’s writing to the blog.

The October traffic exceeded the record I set in February, when I had 36,179 posts. And I passed the record by Oct. 28, so the longer month didn’t play a role in setting the record, just in pushing the total past 40,000, which I topped last night. I should end today a little over 41K.

Though the Baquet guest post was the giant of the month (if anything on a blog this small is a giant), I had two other days over 2,000 views and 16 more days of 1,000 or more.

Archives still drive lots of traffic for the blog. A post on attribution, one on accuracy and two posts on the 5 W’s combined for more than 4,000 posts. Another 25 posts from previous months topped 100 views. Social media is important in attracting attention to fresh content on my blog. But archives and search keep people coming back when the content is not fresh but is timely to someone.

With 18 posts in the month (this makes 19 and it’s the first one this week), this wasn’t nearly my busiest month (on this blog, at least). I had 30 posts in January and 37 in October 2012 and set personal traffic records in both of those months. Both months got boosts from guest posts and October 2012 also got help from reposting some old posts from my old Training Tracks blog.

I also set personal records for traffic and unique visitors on my much smaller blog, Hated Yankees. Though the Yankees, the usual topic of that blog, haven’t done anything in October, my second-favorite team, the Kansas City Royals, had a pretty good month, and I turned my attention to the Royals last month.

Part of this month’s big Hated Yankees’ traffic, though, was a 2010 post debunking the myth that strategy is more difficult in the National League. Somehow that has become the No. 1 Google result for “strategy National League.” Maybe the World Series prompts some searches relating to strategy and the designated-hitter rule. Anyway, a post that never topped 100 views in a month got over 600 views in October. Maybe someone linked to the post (though I didn’t get a pingback). At any rate, that post became the most-read Hated Yankees post, passing a 2009 post about Graig Nettles.

I don’t know what November will bring, but I presume this will be one of the least-read posts of the month. My post about September’s traffic topped out at 79. But I try to practice transparency and I think you should study what’s working and what’s not, so I post this bit of navel-gazing now and then. I’ll probably update the numbers on the weekend, after the month is over.